Earlier this year I needed to stay awake and take stuff for a routine medical procedure (yes. Many of you know exactly what I’m talking about) . I was looking for ways to stay awake. It’s amazing how you can still draw when your eyes are drifting shut, and you know you’ve nodded off for a few seconds.

Anyhoo, to try and keep my brain engaged, I started playing with a base pattern…

…seeing how many different ways I could use it. I’m sure someone has done step-outs for this pattern before, but I’m too lazy to try and find it. My friend Linda Brown Levin felt it looked like an Intersection, so I’ll call it that until such time as I discover an earlier name.

There are a few other patterns salted in there, because I saw a row of apartment buildings appearing and decided to go with that, but then I decided to just stay with the one base pattern and build on it.

If I hadn’t said anything, you might not have even noticed that the whole drawing used the same base pattern throughout.

Later, I played with Intersection again, and this time I stayed with the base pattern, only using shading and the size of the repeating pattern elements to make each section different.